Featured artists
Featured artist: Sharon Schock
Based in Santa Barbara, CA, Sharon Schock paints light-filled scenes inspired by her surroundings. Her alla prima, wet-on-wet technique allows her to capture each moment in a single, expressive sitting.
Featured artist: Tina Figarelli
Tina Figarelli is a realistic figurative painter working from her home studio near Chicago, IL. Inspired by a childhood love of storytelling, she creates narrative-driven works exploring grief, love, and memory through figurative and still-life subjects.
Featured artist: Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch
Artist, author, and international instructor Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch is a leading voice in encaustic art, known for her influential teaching, acclaimed books, and inspiring creative vision. Her award-winning work has been exhibited and collected worldwide.
Featured artist: Stephen O'Donnell
Known since childhood as the “artistic one,” Stephen O’Donnell has followed a winding path back to painting after years exploring music, theater, and performance. Entirely self-taught, his work is rooted in a fascination with history and classical portraiture, yet transformed through themes of self-portraiture, gender, and identity. The result is art that bridges past and present, offering viewers both beauty and space for personal interpretation.
Featured artist: Julia Hagen
After a brief detour into pre-med, Julia Hagen found her way back to art, and back to Chicago. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she spent years exploring different subjects before discovering her true muse: the city’s beloved hot dog stands. Her series Every Last Stand captures these everyday icons with warmth and hometown pride on Ampersand Gessobord.
Featured artist: Elsa Muñoz
When Ampersand President/CEO Elaine Salazar visited The United States and Mexico: A Powerful Past, A Shared Future, a U.S. State Department Art in Embassies exhibition in Mexico, she was struck by a powerful painting titled Primordial Conversations. Upon closer look, she realized it had been painted on Ampersand Gessobord. That moment of recognition led to a full-circle connection: the artist behind the piece was Elsa Muñoz, a former studio mate of Louise LeBourgeois, who had first introduced her to Ampersand panels years earlier.
Featured artist: Tushar Sabale
Tushar Sabale is an Indian-born, London-based, award-winning artist whose work bridges Impressionism and Realism with Luminist influences. Born in India, his artistic journey began in childhood, nurtured by rural landscapes and early mentorship.
Featured artist: Christina Kent
Once a PhD economist, Christina Kent is now a full-time figurative oil painter, inspired by the understanding that art captures the richness of human experience in ways that numbers cannot.
Featured artist: Michael John Ashcroft
After facing a life-altering health scare, British artist Michael John Ashcroft found himself drawn back to painting with a renewed purpose. Known for his atmospheric cityscapes and serene landscapes, Ashcroft has since become a member of several of England's most prestigious oil painting societies.
Featured artist: Paul Jackson
Paul Jackson is a master of noir pop art whose detailed drawings and paintings are often filled with dystopian humor, challenging the viewer to confront the absurdity of modern life.
Featured artist: Jess Wathen
Jess Wathen is a unique talent whose glowing oil paintings of wildlife blend masterful brushwork and texture. Inspired by comic book, video games, and metal music, Jess's work captures the balance between reality and imagination.
Featured artist: Louise De Masi
World Watercolor Month ambassador Louise De Masi has been a lifelong artist. Her career as a signwriter led her to acrylics, but the discovery of watercolors in 2011 reignited her joy of painting.
Featured artist: Casey Zoltan and Known Gallery
Street art veteran Casey Zoltan, founder of Known Gallery in Los Angeles, invited us to collaborate on an immersive art exhibit that pays tribute to the iconic AMPERSAND symbol.
Featured artist: Kelley Mogilka
Kelley Mogilka is drawn to the specific shapes and colors that make up a person’s features. She thinks it’s fascinating how those abstract qualities, when translated into two dimensions by being painted or drawn, can reflect and even amplify the essence of a person.
Featured artist: Natalie Featherston
Artist Natalie Featherston works exclusively in the centuries-old realm of trompe l’oeil, creating dazzling paintings that combine the virtuosity of a Dutch master with a thoroughly modern mind. The Chicago Sun-Times has described her work as “Artful beyond just illusion and trickery, they are truly masterful still lifes made with both craft and wit.”
Featured artist: Emily Boyd
Drawing a grid by hand and then meticulously filling each small square with marks is slow and quiet. The process remains significant to Claybord artist Emily Boyd as she has learned that quietness isn’t necessarily based on the noise and commotion level around us but that which is inside our hearts and minds.
